Pleasant evenings can go astray

We often hear the phrase "Thank goodness it's Friday!"

This indicates that the pressures of the workweek are behind us and we have the weekend to laze around or do some cherished activity. Have you discovered that it doesn't always work that way? A comic strip that appeared this weekend showed parents waking up on Monday saying, "Thank goodness it's Monday."

This was after a weekend of entertaining the children in the family. Routine work sounded more appealing than the actions of the past two days.

It doesn't always take a whole weekend to show us that routine work sometimes can be more restful than free time.

Last Friday night we were bombarded with several unhappy occurrences within a very short span of time.

I received a long distance call from a good friend in Savannah, Mo. She was telling me about the situation with a Vietnamese woman whom Lester and I had helped as she arrived in the United States after the exodus from Vietnam of U.S. workers and relations at the ending of that war. For several years we were her second family and have still kept in fairly close touch through the years. The call was to tell me that she had decided to go live in a nursing home because of her health and lack of caregivers. While I was still on the phone getting more details, our great-granddaughter came in crying that, "Flower is dead!" Flower is a cat that our daughter and great-granddaughter have had between them for about seven years. Marilyn had gone to the pond to see if her little sister was getting fish to come eat the stale bread we had given her to feed the fish. She looked down in the weeds away from the dock and saw the cat lying there. It had obviously been killed by an animal.

The ground was so hard that our daughter couldn't dig a proper grave for their pet so I called our grandson's house to see if anyone over there could come help them with their sad job.

While we were waiting for help to arrive the younger great-granddaughter was stung by a bee. I was mixing a paste of baking soda and water to soothe her pains when the helpers arrived. The grandson got out to help with the burial but a 2-year-old and his mother remained in the van. I remembered that I owed our daughter-in-law for some groceries, so I ran out with a $20 bill to ask them to take to Jenny. The engine was still running to keep the van occupants cool, but the driver's side window was down slightly so I could put my hand in to give them the money. At the same time the youngster in the car got his arm stuck in the crack by the window and his mother, not seeing what I was trying to do, raised the window to free his little arm.

The results were that my right hand received a continuous painful pressure as it was pinned at the top of the window. I started yelling but there was so much going on that the mother didn't know what the problem was immediately. I was released and found that all my fingers still worked, but the poor mother was very upset that she had caused her future grandmother-in-law to get hurt.

The toddler was OK, the middle age plus woman was OK, the cat got buried, the bee sting quit hurting and then while I was cradling my aching fingers, our youngest great-granddaughter asked, "Grandmommy, when are we going to have supper?"